How to run a targeted giveaway in e-commerce

Running giveaways is a common method of increasing your audience, getting more traffic and attracting more potential clients. They’re relatively cheap and fast when it comes to building audiences and creating a buzz around your brand. You can also use our Magento 2 Reward Points to back up the giveaways.

However, it’s not that easy to run a successful giveaway, which will attract the right people. After all, you want your potential clients to enter, so you could later on use these leads to grow your business. Same goes for building audiences – you want only the most relevant social media users to subscribe/like/share your content for maximum impact.

There are a number of rules, which you should follow if you want to properly run giveaways to unveil their maximum potential. Still, you should remember that unconditional giveaways are not the only attractive promotion option. Try to set up a multitude of Magento ‘Buy X Get Y Free’ promos.

Pick the Right Season

It’s important to understand the context of your product and how it will resonate with the audience. Will your potential clients find interest in what you have to offer? For example, you’re selling swimsuits and launching a giveaway during the winter. Would this be the best time to attract participants, given that people are actually looking for warm clothing and not bikinis? Of course, this only makes sense for products that have a seasonal nature.

Give Away Your Product, Not a Random Item

There are tons of giveaways that offer gift cards from Amazon, Steam or other online stores. This means that virtually anyone might be interested in the giveaway. As a result, you’ll be getting a lot of participants, who might not care about your product. These people are less likely to convert or react to your content in the future. Giveaways like these also attract ‘giveaway hunters’ – people willing to enter for the chance of getting the freebie, something they do all the time. Some people even live off coupons and freebies like that. So they don’t actually care about your product.

By offering your specific product you’re:

More likely to attract people interested in the product itself

Getting the chance to additionally market the product when the giveaway is being shared through various channels

likely to get a review of the product from the winners since people are sharing what they won in contests and giveaways

Aim for User-Generated Content

At the same time, giving away your product won’t completely solve the problem of giveaway hunters, as they’re completely ok with getting the item and just selling it on Craigslist (or other similar platforms) later on.

That’s where user-generated content comes in. Include a requirement for the participants to create a piece of content in order to be qualified. For example, ask them to take a picture with your brand in it and ask users to make it funny. Or ask people to write a short note on why they should be getting the product. By raising the barrier for entry like that you’re more likely to attract people, who are actually interested in the product.

Here’s a great example: Zumba Fitness campaign was giving away concert tickets in exchange for a dance routine. Great idea and tons of reactions:

You can find other great video submissions to this contest – just search for #workthisbody on Facebook.

The downside of this approach is that your giveaway’s engagement might suffer, because of all of the discouraged people. This is something that you have to experiment with – require content that’s easy to create, so that more people would go through the hustle of entering the giveaway.

Another great advantage of this approach is that you end up with tons of user-generated content that you can use in your promotions, social media posts and all sorts of other publications.

Run Ads for the Giveaway

The more people will know about your giveaway – the more people are going to sign up. It’s very simple.

However, if you’re just starting out and your audience doesn’t have the right impact, you might want to consider running ads for the giveaway.

Given that you’re not competing for people that want to actually buy something, the price of ads might be relatively cheap.

Of course, it also depends on your target demographics and the channel that you choose to advertise through.

Facebook ads are relatively cheap and can get many people interested (but those leads, in turn, are less actionable).

Use Social Outlets to Test Your Giveaway

There are plenty of opportunities to test out your giveaway before committing any advertising funds towards it. This way you can also test different products and audiences to find the most fitting mix.

For example, here’s a list of 50+ subreddits, which you can use for your giveaways. They’re sorted by products, countries and other parameters. You can test your giveaway with various audiences and demographics and find the right combination.

This also works for Facebook and G+ communities, related forums and other destinations, where your target audience might be spending their time.

Be Specific with Your Numbers

Here we mean any number that you mention in the giveaway: prize amount/quantity, deadline for submissions, deadline for any announcements, etc. It’s important that your rules for the giveaway are clear and pretty straightforward. This way you’ll avoid any possible backlash and negative buzz about your brand or the product that you will be giving away.

Any other tips that you’d suggest for a successful giveaway? Let us know in the comments below!

About The Author

Written by Alex Plotnikov - marketing manager at MageCloud.net, a unique Magento PaaS, which allows you to easily deploy and manage Magento stores automatically, within a single environment and without programming skills. Alex enjoys learning more about the intricacies of running eCommerce stores.